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Time Backer Review

No DeLorean necessary

Have you ever wanted to go back in time? Although this app won’t allow you to physically transport yourself to some point in the past, it will allow you to see the state of billions of webpages as they once were stretching from a few months ago back to 1996. In effect, you have the web as a timeline at your fingertips, able to call up specific websites from specific days.

This is brilliant if you want to see a slice of web history, and great if you knew there was something on a page back in the day that does not exist any more. Using Time Backer is incredibly easy. All you do is input a date and URL and the app will do the rest, trawling back to find the page that you are after. It does warn that not all of the images and formatting will be correct, but for most tasks that won’t matter much.

You can also check the Time Map. This is a list of dates according to the years for which archives are available, and this is great if you are not sure just which selection of pages will be available for a given site. At first you will simply be curious and look for pages of your favourite sites (checking out the differences between Facebook then and now is particularly fun), but in the long term, you may find yourself returning to it when performing advanced searches.

The app doesn’t clutter its interface with pointless stuff, it simply goes about doing what it should.